The Classic Problem
The work/life balancing act is the same as it was twenty-five years ago.
Hello, drawing book readers! Welcome back to another episode of old Calgary comics. This week, we’re still going through some early web comics I wrote in 2001. I’d been living in my much-loved apartment on 5A Street in Calgary’s Beltline neighbourhood, since 1998. I still loved it there, but I was starting to feel like some things weren’t working. For example, my mom was selling our old family house, where I’d grown up. This meant our two elderly family dogs would need a new place to live… and it looked like it was going to have to be with me.
My apartment was not the ideal place for two old dogs! It was at the top of a steep outdoor staircase…
And the fate of the dogs was not my only problem.
Indeed, many squirrels lived behind the floorboards, the ceilings, the walls of that house. Once, I opened my kitchen cupboard and a squirrel was inside! That was the last straw. I loved that apartment - the first place I’d really lived on my own. But it was time for a change.
Along with all that, there were yet more worries! Like the worry that I might have to work on the 747! Back then, I was a flight attendant with Air Canada, and my flight to Frankfurt was on the A340. I knew my way around on that airplane. The 747… some of them were configured for five hundred passengers! Yikes.
Ah yes, the classic problem. What would my 2001 self have thought, if she had known I would have exactly the same problem, twenty-five years later in 2026? I’m not even joking. It is EXACTLY the same. Maybe this is just a lifelong balancing act, no matter how old we get.
These days, I have to content myself with mostly-decaf coffee. But otherwise, the solution is about the same, twenty-five years later, too!
I wrote this next story about the boy I had been cautiously dating for almost a year. After getting a broken heart in 2000, I was being pretty careful not to let things get too serious.
(As I made that banana bread, you can see I was listening to one of Bob Dylan’s greatest tunes ever - definitely one of my top ten - Changing of the Guards. Honestly, kind of a weird choice… it is not exactly a cozy, domestic song. But, it’s still great!)
I wasn’t quite keeping up with my friends when it came to relationship stuff. But I was getting ready for some big responsibilities. I was going to have to find a new place to live.